Joe Scarborough: ‘President has a plan’

Joe Scarborough on Friday said he believes President Barack Obama has a strategy for combating the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and that his comments at a news conference the day before might have been “strategic.”

“The president has a plan on ISIS,” the MSNBC host said near the open of “Morning Joe,” using the alternative name for ISIL. “Does he know exactly where they’re going to bomb in Syria? Maybe, maybe not. I suspect they probably do.”

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'We don't have a strategy yet'

The former Republican congressman insisted that he wasn’t defending Obama and said the president’s comments at a Thursday briefing with reporters may have been “inartful.”

But Scarborough, who is also a columnist for POLITICO, said it was likely that the president wanted to conceal his strategy on ISIL instead of broadcasting it on a global stage, and suggested Obama’s answer could have been part of a “bigger and better” strategy not to show his hand.

“To think that Barack Obama and his secretary of defense and his secretary of state and everyone else around him — chief of staff — have not been obsessing about ISIS 24 hours a day is outrageous,” he said. “They have.”

At the White House on Thursday, Obama spoke about ISIL, the group that has swept across much of eastern Syria and northern and central Iraq. The Obama administration said it has been considering airstrikes against the group in Syria. On Thursday, though, the president said: “I don’t want to put the cart before the horse. We don’t have a strategy yet.”

His remarks drew criticism from many Republicans and conservative media outlets, many of whom said the comments confirm that the president has been disengaged from the world and is weak on foreign policy.

On Friday, though, Scarborough said he would have done something similar if he were president as a way to prevent the enemy from knowing his plan. “If I’m about to attack another country, I would say, you know what, we don’t have a strategy, we’re still working it out,” he said.

Scarborough also seemed receptive to a comment from Huffington Post White House correspondent Sam Stein, who said some have suggested that Obama was signaling to Europe that the U.S. will not shoulder the “entire burden” in combating ISIL.